Treatment for painful episodes of blood vessel obstruction in sickle cell anemia is currently limited to controlling pain, but an investigational therapy might be able to interfere with the underlying cause of these events, ...

(HealthDay)—The high number of blood tests done before and after heart surgery can sometimes lead to excessive blood loss, possibly causing anemia and the need for a blood transfusion, new research suggests.

(Medical Xpress)—What if you could attack cancer cells at their source without hurting the surrounding healthy cells? A group of researchers from the University of Virginia, the University of Massachusetts, Cornell University, ...

The University of Maryland School of Medicine is part of a new nationwide, multi-site study that may help save hundreds of lives among trauma patients with major bleeding. The study, which was published earlier this month ...

The order in which genetic mutations are acquired determines how an individual cancer behaves, according to research from the University of Cambridge, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Air-lifted trauma victims who received blood transfusions in the helicopter before arriving at a trauma center had higher one-day survival rates and less chance of shock than air-lifted patients who did not receive blood ...

When we think of how we fight disease, the image of cells in our immune system fending off microbial invaders often comes to mind. Another strategy our bodies can employ is to cut off the enemy's supply lines and effectively ...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have engineered a way to use human liver cells, derived from induced pluripotent stem cells, to screen potential antimalarial drugs and vaccines for their ability to ...

Among patients with severe trauma and major bleeding, those who received a transfusion of a balanced ratio of plasma, platelets, and red blood cells (RBCs) were more likely to have their bleeding stopped and less likely to ...

Moderate consumption of alcohol has been associated with health benefits in some—but not all—studies. Researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine may have found an explanation, in part, for why non-smokers might ...

Red blood cell

Red blood cells are the most common type of blood cell and the vertebrate body's principal means of delivering oxygen to the body tissues via the blood. They take up oxygen in the lungs or gills and release it while squeezing through the body's capillaries. The cells are filled with hemoglobin, a biomolecule that can bind to oxygen. The blood's red color is due to the color of oxygen-rich hemoglobin. In humans, red blood cells develop in the bone marrow and live for about 120 days; they take the form of flexible biconcave disks that lack a cell nucleus and organelles and they cannot synthesize protein.

Red blood cells are also known as RBCs, red blood corpuscles (an archaic term), haematids or erythrocytes (from Greek erythros for "red" and kytos for "hollow", with cyte translated as "cell" in modern usage). The capitalized term Red Blood Cells is the proper name in the US for erythrocytes in storage solution used in transfusion medicine.